The waiting game

The chief of the US Army Reserve warned of a serious risk of running out of critical specialists. This is in line with the earlier reports of the Selective Service System preparing for the scenario of a skills-based draft, targeting computer skills and foreign languages.

It's clear that those fighting the USA are likely in a waiting game, prolonging conflict with the expectation that exhaustion will set in for the US armed forces. With the US less able to project force, they would be able to act more freely with fewer concerns about US intervention. From their vantage point, the greater the amount of US intervention now, the faster they can bring about such a state. Limits have been already reached. For instance, the USA cannot intervene in Sudan, as it doesn't have the forces to spare.

The USA is pushing to train local forces in nine countries in Africa and other countries in Central Asia, diverting more resources to training Iraqi police.

Such initiatives and cooperation can be interpreted as the outsourcing of security. Whatever it takes to reasonably avoid a draft in the US.

Blast or no?

According to one report, there was a mushroom cloud observed in North Korea. US officials have denied that it was a nuclear blast, suggesting that it could have been a forest fire. However, there's also a missile base and underground test range in the area. It could have been an accident, conventional or nuclear, which would be consistent with the lack of triumphant rhetoric from North Korea.

Hard numbers about US power grid vulnerabilities

It turns out that a loss as little as 2% of the grid substations can take down the entire system in a cascade failure; presumably high load-boarding substations were targeted in that simulation. The nature of the vulnerability is not new to those who have kept up with scale-free analyses of the power grid, but the figure is. Among the proposed solutions is keeping an eye on increasing redundancy in the network when making future expansions. Redundancy is less efficient, and not automatically rewarded by market forces. You can have cheaper power, but not without risk.

Not simply insane

According to a press release by Royal College of Psychiatrists, terrorists are not technically insane.

The term 'terrorist' is not a psychiatric diagnosis, the Royal College of Psychiatrists heard today. Dr Andrew Silke, a forensic psychologist at the University of Leicester and an adviser to the UN, said the outstanding characteristic of terrorists is 'normality' with forensic assessments of terrorists from the Baader Meinhof to Al Queda revealing high levels of mental health.
The widespread view that terrorists are isolated, vulnerable young men with paranoid or borderline personality disorders, is false. It is entirely perpetuated by experts relying on second hand reports, he told the conference.
A survey of 180 members of Al Queda revealed that all came from middle or upper class backgrounds, with two thirds being college educated, one in ten with a postgraduate degree and 73 per cent married with children, he said.
Dr Wilfred Rusch, a Berlin psychiatrist employed by the German Government to assess Baader Meinhof terrorists concluded that none of these people are crazy - there is no psychiatric explanation as to why they were involved in terrorism.

This makes intuitive sense when one considers that those who are unable to maintain the appearance of normality are unsuitable for use as sleepers. Therefore, those with impulse control are selected for. So what does drive them?

Dr Silke said it was important to understand that the word terrorist is a political not a psychiatric diagnosis, with catalyst events, usually involving violence, creating the energy and the desire for revenge and the wish to punish the state.

More recently, brain scans revealed portions of the brain which are hardwired to enjoy anticipating revenge. It's a key piece of the puzzle.

Planning revenge sparks enough satisfaction to motivate getting even — and the amount of satisfaction actually predicts who will go to greater lengths to do so, report Swiss researchers who monitored people's brain activity during an elaborate game of double-cross...
But beyond helping to unravel how the brain makes social and moral decisions, the study illustrates growing interest in the interaction between emotion and cognition — which in turn influences other fields such as how to better model the economy.
The new study chips "yet another sliver from the rational model of economic man," said Stanford University psychologist Brian Knutson, who reviewed the Swiss research. "Instead of cold, calculated reason, it is passion that may plant the seeds of revenge," he said.
People often are eager to punish wrongdoers even if the revenge brings them no personal gain or actually costs them something. From a practical standpoint, that may seem irrational.

Apparently irrational, but seemingly normal, and certainly rational so far as they can plan and achieve operational goals. Regarding hearts and minds, the former is far more volatile.

Wrong holy cities?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but it's things like this which make me question the reliability of briefings presented to the US administration. From a February 2003 DoD press release:

Wolfowitz: First of all, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. We won't need troops in Saudi Arabia when there's no longer an Iraqi threat. The Saudi problem will be transformed. In Iraq, first of all the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory. They are totally different situations. But the most fundamental difference is that, let me put it this way. We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq.
There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.

At the time, he apparently hadn't been briefed on Karbala:

KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Crowds of Shia Muslims Wednesday chanted and danced in the streets of this holy city on the final day of a pilgrimage long suppressed under Saddam Hussein's rule...
Karbala is where Muslim martyr Imam Hussein bin Ali -- grandson of the prophet Mohammed -- was killed and entombed more than 1,300 years ago.

Or Najaf:

U.S. tanks rumbled Friday into a vast cemetery in the southern city of Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's most sacred places, in pursuit of insurgents loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fighting, which coincided with skirmishes in the other major Shiite holy city, Karbala, demonstrated some of the most aggressive tactics yet employed by U.S. forces against Sadr's Shiite militia.

Did someone forget to do their homework to check if the Shiites had holy cities too?